mbm

Thou art a sage.

I agree with your assertion but not really the justification you give. I don't think he needed an ultimate goal; he followed what seems like a random walk but ultimately found something that worked, hugely. There's definitely survivorship bias, but heck, if we discounted all stories by that criterion the world would be a much less interesting, albeit perhaps more realistic, place.

This reminds me of a quote I read from a lecture a few years back by a history prof at Colby:

"How long will you need to find your truest, most productive niche? This I cannot predict, for, sadly, access to a podium confers no gift of prophecy. But I can say that however long it takes, it will be time well spent. I am reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, too, because, for all his potential, he lacked focus. He had been a history major in college, and a linguistics minor. On graduating, though, he concluded that, as rewarding as these fields had been, he was not really cut out to make a living at them. He decided that what he was really meant to do was study economics. And so, he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at the University of Wisconsin. And, after only a semester, he dropped out of the program. Not for him. So, history was out; linguistics, out; economics, out. What to do? This was a time of widespread political activism, and Ed became an aide to Senator George McGovern, then running for the presidency on an anti-war platform. He also wrote articles for political journals like the Nation and the New Republic. After some months, Ed realized that politics was not for him, because, in his words, it demanded qualities he did not have, foremost among them common sense. All right, then: history, linguistics, economics, politics, were all out as career choices. What to do? Ed suddenly realized that he was really suited to study mathematics. So he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at Princeton. I met him midway through his first year there--just after he had dropped out of the mathematics department. He realized, he said, that what he was really meant to do was study physics; he applied to the physics department, and was accepted.

I was happy for him. But I lamented all the false starts he had made, and how his career opportunities appeared to be passing him by. Many years later, in 1987, I was reading the New York Times magazine and saw a full-page picture akin to a mug shot, of a thin man with a large head staring out of thick glasses. It was Ed Witten! I was stunned. What was he doing in the Times magazine? Well, he was being profiled as the Einstein of his age, a pioneer of a revolution in physics called "String Theory." Colleagues at Harvard and Princeton, who marvelled at his use of bizarre mathematics to solve physics problems, claimed that his ideas, popularly called a "theory of everything," might at last explain the origins and nature of the cosmos. Ed said modestly of his theories that it was really much easier to solve problems when you analyzed them in at least ten dimensions. Perhaps. Much clearer to me was an observation Ed made that appeared near the end of this article: every one of us has talent; the great challenge in life is finding an outlet to express it. I thought, he has truly earned the right to say that. And I realized that, for all my earlier concerns that he had squandered his time, in fact his entire career path--the ventures in history, linguistics, economics, politics, math, as well as physics--had been rewarding: a time of hard work, self-discovery, and new insight into his potential based on growing experience."

Homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/) is a Macports alternative also worth taking a look at.

MacVim, its delightful. Or Aquamacs, if you're an Emacs guy.

Another small victory for the ranks of corporate America.

Writing a 57-page math paper in something other than LaTex (appears to be Word for God's sake) is nothing short of Herculean.

I can't give you a real answer, except to say that it probably involves Clint Eastwood.

I faced this my senior year of college too. What drove me out of the rough was Dweck's Mindset. Get your hands on a copy if you haven't read it yet. The take-away for me was that the apathy I sometimes felt was a kind of scapegoat for avoiding situations where I could fail. Instead of increasing my effort when I was faced with the hardest problems, I decreased it by avoiding them. This reduces the probability of failure but also ironically of success as well, which tends to sting in the long run if you don't catch it.

Irony: (n) - incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs

On one hand, the healthcare law is a source of tremendous uncertainty for physicians. As so-called 'medico-legal' liability standards continue to become more stringent, and physicians are increasingly burdened with administrative costs, the profession is itself in rapid flux.

From my perspective, there are probably three important things occurring at a fundamental level which may be likely to dramatically change medicine in the relatively short-term.

1. Electronic medical records and more accountability in medicine through the (eventual) re-alignment of incentives for hospitals and physician practices.

EMR makes it fundamentally easier to track where a physician practice's money is flowing, and to collect data on the effectiveness of treatments for different classes of patients. Right now, physician practices are not incentivized to focus on metrics from a business standpoint because its often not (a) viable from a cost standpoint or (b) able to be easily actionable for the physicians. As EMR technology continues to improve (see Practice Fusion for an example of a great technology which is incidentally free) and as the policy environment slowly adapts to incentivize doing what's best for the patient, I think outcomes will improve. This is, IMO, the messiest problem confronting medicine today.

2. Genetics and genetics research

I work for a diagnostic genetics startup. DNA sequencing technology is finally getting to the point where doing business in this field is able to be viable from a cost standpoint. As sequencing technology becomes 'democratized' to the extent that individual research labs are able to purchase essentially desktop sequencers to conduct research, the quality and breadth of genetics research will probably be significantly greater.

3. Bio-engineering

MIT recently added a bio-engineering major. Much of the early-stage research occurring at MIT, Rice, and other colleges with dedicated bio-engineering departments is extremely interesting. I hope that more colleges and the government will put money into translational research programs aimed at bringing discoveries in the lab into the clinic. Though I'm not qualified to write about this in depth, I considered attending graduate school in bio-engineering and found much of the research in tissue engineering and the like to be very, very interesting. It's just so early that it's hard to tell. However, I've found bioengineering departments to have this sort of inspiring zeitgeist pervading them that I imagine is similar to how physics felt at the dawn of the 20th-century. They aren't exactly sure what they're doing, they simply can't be at this early stage, but they know it has the potential to be very important.

I think that medicine will remain viable. Things will change, that's for sure, but I think it can be a net win.

EDIT: The last sentence of point 2 should read, "once I had looked like a fool quite a few times." Foolish of me to have left that out.

This is a great question. I'll share a couple thoughts and experiences.

1. A great post was written by Paul Buchheit that called things like fear of public speaking, which may be an inflamed variation of fear of conversation, 'ego-fear'. While this may not be technically correct, it could be a useful psychological framework. See post here: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/10/serendipity-finds-y....

2. When I was young I was very nervous around girls, and hated public speaking. Along the way I became pretty good with girls and captain on my debate team. The key ingredients were a willingness to keep trying to improve and being willing to shrug off failure. The first times I approached women I was an absolute fool but I eventually improved by gaining a sense of what's socially viable. With regards to public speaking, I was very nervous when I started out. But, once I had looked like a quite a few times, I got pretty good and ended up being the leader of several organizations in high school and college.

3. A friend of mine who is quite brilliant but very introverted suggested the book "The Game," which basically describes how to hack romance. I wouldn't suggest applying this book to your love life, but some of its insights might be worth checking out. When you understand that your interactions with other people of the same sex are often as complex as those of the opposite, it becomes a fundamentally different (and often more tractable) problem. My friend read this book, saw some therapists, and was willing to look like a fool the first couple times as he talked to girls and publicly spoke. He's now dating a beautiful girl and gave something like 300 public speeches our senior year while the president of one of my college's biggest organizations.

So, my experience has been that repetitive practice and willingness to learn are key ingredients to improving and conquering what may be related fears. Funny how this seems to be the formula for success with almost anything.

It's intriguing that the author's two-page rebuttal is among her 'selected publications'.

http://www.sph.unc.edu/nciph/jane_monaco_1990_1984.html

According to Google Scholar, it's actually been cited 137 times. Another paper published in '98, cited 499 times, reads:

The integrated area under the curve (AUC) analysis for glucose and insulin was determined according to the formula of Tai et al.

Damn.

Not really a useful counterpoint. No one would argue that Obama's a poor speaker, just that more exposed dialogue these days can make even the most eloquent of speakers seem clumsy. Fortunately TR and Honest Abe didn't have to worry about Politico & co.

^ spam

Did your demo show all current functionality?

This made me think of an article in the NYT the other day. Here's a short excerpt:

Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

Brilliant design seems to works in a similar way. A product that reveals something masterful about its creator evokes a human response on a level most marketing departments will never understand.

It's "to," man! I thought that degree was supposed to provide you with some writin' skillz?

I think I finally understand politics. In some realms reason just isn't, and maybe even can't be, king.

It's too bad Newton wasn't as succinct.

Sure, no problem.

Like I mentioned in the listing, I work for a startup. One quick thing I wanted to do today was to get some very basic data on our competitors from an online source. I wanted to retrieve the following data for each of them:

(a) full company name (b) current stock price (c) market cap (d) price-to-earnings ratio

I assume it wouldn't be too hard to extend this to other data as well, as long as it's visible in a basic corporate financial profile on Google/Yahoo finance or something similar. There's functionality to do this through Google Docs (a function called GoogleFinance()), but I'd like to try to do it manually (so I can learn).

I've retrieved data from webpages before, but I'm not sure how to ensure I'm getting the actual values. I know it's probably trivial to get this directly through some tool that creates a CSV file [e.g., http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm], but then I couldn't beat Mr. C (I don't hate C, I just want to show him it can be done with less code).

I've thrown up a small subset of our competitors' info into a public spreadsheet you can view:

(https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgbmjbWQrdmgdGZLb3V...)

Each column is a different competitor. The abbreviation before the colon is an abbreviation for the market the stock trades in (some are international markets, others are nonstandard) and the part after the colon is the stock symbol.

thanks for your help guys!